Diary

Cheating on Phil (with Paris)

Covering Phil Spector’s murder trial, with its roller-coaster testimony and cross-examination, is the author’s top priority. But when the Paris Hilton story explodes all around him, it’s hard to resist a detour—and an invitation to the Hilton estate.

I wanted a castle … and there aren’t many left. —Phil Spector, in an interview with Mick Brown that appeared in the Telegraph magazine in London on February 1, 2003, two days before the shooting death of Lana Clarkson. An altered version appears in Brown’s biography of Spector, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound.

I’ve been up to Phil Spector’s castle in Alhambra a few times. Just to gawk and have my picture taken there for this magazine. I’m fascinated by it. Inside the front gate 88 stone steps lead to the entrance. He liked visitors to walk up these steps, as Lana Clarkson did on the last night of her life, with Phil, who was allegedly very drunk. She had met him that night at the House of Blues, where she was a hostess, and had agreed to go home with him. It’s not like a Disneyland castle. You can’t see much of it from either the front or back entrance gates to the estate, but it looks like a real castle, of the kind that Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria might have built. It’s very lonely-looking. It must be spooky at night, when the wind is blowing through all the tall trees that block it from the road. I kept wondering what Phil and Rachelle, his 26-year-old wife, whom he married last September and who likes to be called Chelle, talk about at dinner in that solitary castle, where Lana Clarkson died of a gunshot through the mouth. The bergère chair with white damask upholstery, in which Lana Clarkson’s body was found slumped, with her long legs stretched out in front of her, is one of a pair of French chairs placed in the foyer, with a French chest next to the carved wooden banister of the staircase. A holster matching the Colt Cobra .38 revolver that killed Clarkson was in the drawer of the chest. The revolver itself was next to her left foot, as if she had dropped it, although she happened to have been right-handed. Spector’s chauffeur, Adriano De Souza, who was waiting in the driveway to drive Lana home that night, has already testified that Spector was carrying a .38-caliber gun when he came outside and said the five words that have been at the center of this trial: “I think I killed somebody.”

Forensic scientist Lynne Denise Herold of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said on the stand that the blood on Lana’s face had been wiped off, possibly with a wetted diaper that was found by the police in a downstairs lavatory. Spector’s hands were clean when he was arrested, and as there were no blood traces in the drain of the sink, it was suggested by the prosecution that he could have washed his hands in the burgundy-colored toilet bowl. Later, when I came out of the men’s room, Rachelle Spector, who was waiting for her husband, asked me jokingly, “Did you wash your hands in the toilet?” A pair of false eyelashes were found on top of the toilet, an oddity that has not yet been explained.

I never did get inside the castle. I never got past the front or back gates, as a matter of fact. I even stood in front of the security camera a few times and waved, hoping that Phil might be watching and invite me in and show me around the castle. It didn’t happen, but I did get friendly with one of his guards, when he came down from the castle and very nicely asked me to leave, which I did, as I had accidentally set off an alarm when I leaned against the gates. The guard and I now call each other “Horace” and “Dominick.” His company is called Big Time Protection.

The wall around the estate has huge cracks in it, as if from an earthquake. The place has begun to look a little run-down, but I suppose Spector must think, What’s the point of keeping it up when the future is so uncertain and the legal bills are so enormous? At a couple of parties I’ve been to since I got to L.A. to cover this trial, high-up folks in the music industry wonder if Spector can afford the assault his legal fees are making on his fortune. High-priced lawyers get their money up front, so he has already laid out several million bucks, for prominent lawyers such as Robert Shapiro and Leslie Abramson, both of whom he has since dumped. It is known that just before the trial Spector took out two loans on his castle in Alhambra and a third loan on a town house he owns a short distance away. The total amount came to $1,271,000. He’s got a lot of people on his team he has to pay. Not to mention the upcoming civil trial, which will follow the criminal trial. The lawyer who will bring the lawsuit against Spector, Roderick Lindblom, sits next to Lana Clarkson’s mother, Donna, every day in court. They are quite friendly. The media have been instructed by Lindblom not to speak to Donna Clarkson. No one has.

I received a very nice note from Phil, which was handed to me in the courtroom, thanking me for lending him the book from Ahmet Ertegun’s memorial service at Lincoln Center last April. It was Ahmet Ertegun, the Sultan of Rock, who introduced Phil and me back in the late 80s. “Dear Dominick,” he wrote. “Thanks so much for letting me peruse Ahmet’s Memorial Book. I’m so sorry I could not personally attend the Memorial. It’s so difficult for me to picture a world with Ahmet not in it. I did so enjoy reading the words about our dear friend; and the pictures were a treasure. Thanks for thinking of me. Love, Phillip.” His stationery is bordered with the musical notes of one of his songs, like sheet music, with his corrections on it. It was signed with a very elaborate signature, which, it took me a long time to figure out, is just “Phillip.”

Although my dedication to the Phil Spector trial is total, I must confess to a momentary unfaithfulness when I became involved in the Paris Hilton drama that seemed to captivate the world for a couple of weeks. I happen to know and like Paris’s parents, Rick and Kathy Hilton. They send out a family photograph each Christmas, of the six of them sitting in a paneled library with chintz-covered chairs. Paris is not prominently featured in the photograph. She’s just one of the four Hilton kids, along with her sister, Nicky, and her rarely photographed brothers, Conrad and Barron, named after their great-grandfather and grandfather. I’ve met Paris only once. It was at Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg’s annual picnic the day before the Academy Awards in 2006. Paris was with Stavros Niarchos, of the Greek shipping family, who was her boyfriend at the time. I told her she and I had gone to the same strict, Catholic boarding school, Canterbury, in New Milford, Connecticut, about a hundred years apart.

She said, “Oh, I only lasted about three months there.” She was funny and friendly.

Little did I know that Paris’s bachelorette house is just up behind the famous Chateau Marmont, the hotel where I have been staying these past two months during the Spector trial. One morning I was awakened before six by helicopters hovering above and the echo of loud voices coming through my open window, which I realized were the voices of photographers, cameramen, pre-dawn fans, cops, and angry neighbors bitching about Paris’s special treatment. Sheriff Lee Baca, a controversial figure in Los Angeles, had let Paris out of jail during the night, after she’d served only 3 days of her 45-day sentence. I couldn’t resist going up to take a look on my way to court, which turned out to be a mistake. I ended up on local television, with about 50 microphones in my face, calling the early release from prison “rich-kid justice.” “Do you think the judge was making an example out of her?” someone asked me along the way. Yes, I do think the judge made an example out of Paris, but I also think that Paris was crying out to be made an example of. It was time for her to change her act.

I must admit that I was taken aback a bit when I watched on the local news and saw that Kathy Hilton was the most notable and photographed guest at the ceremony for Barbara Walters when she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, on Hollywood Boulevard, a hallowed tradition of the entertainment community. Watching her, you’d never have thought that her famous daughter was in jail and on the front pages of newspapers around the world. I found it curious that she would be there. Then I was invited to a cocktail party the Hiltons gave in honor of Barbara. As their Bel Air house is undergoing extensive renovations, they gave their party at the magnificent estate of Barron Hilton, Rick Hilton’s father. Long known as the old Paley estate, it’s one of the great old Los Angeles mansions, with big rooms and wide halls and a Georgian exterior.

It was the day before Father’s Day, and Paris’s Father’s Day card to Rick was placed on a chair for all to see. It was elaborately homemade, about three feet high and two feet wide. Large pasted-on rhinestones edged the four sides of the card, making a frame. Inside were family photographs, mostly of Paris and Rick over the years, each one bordered with smaller rhinestones. “Love, Paris” was printed in blue in the lower right-hand corner. I think we were meant to believe that Paris had made the card and pasted on all those rhinestones, but I can’t imagine where she found the time or the rhinestones to do all that in the Century Regional Detention Facility.

There were 30 or 40 people at the party, a mixed bag of prominent Angelenos who didn’t seem to know one another. I talked to Dan Tana, who owns the restaurant of the same name, where Phil Spector had dinner on the night Lana Clarkson died. Everyone I talked to wanted to hear about Phil Spector. It was less awkward than discussing the plight of the hosts’ daughter. It was a strange time to give a party. After an hour or so, the Hiltons showed a short documentary of Barbara Walters’s career, and after Rick introduced her, Barbara spoke briefly. Barbara, looking very chic in New York black in a roomful of ladies in pastel, was going straight from the party to the airport to catch the red-eye for New York. I figured out the reason for the public display of affection between Barbara and the Hiltons was that Barbara had apparently snagged the first interview with Paris when she got out of jail.

But things didn’t turn out that way. Barbara would have been the perfect person for the interview, but money got in the way. The story goes that Rick Hilton phoned Barbara in New York at two o’clock in the morning and left a message to tell her that they were going with NBC, saying in effect that the money was just too good to turn down. NBC allegedly offered Paris a million dollars for the interview, which would be with Meredith Vieira on the Today show. There was a further complication that had nothing to do with the Hiltons—back when Meredith Vieira left Barbara’s show The View to replace Katie Couric on the Today show, the word in high media circles was that there was a certain amount of bad feeling between Barbara and Meredith. The alleged offer turned out to be a catastrophic error for the news division at NBC, and they canceled the interview plans after much criticism from other news agencies who never pay for interviews. CBS said they had no interest. When the Hiltons went back to Barbara Walters through ABC, they were met with a figurative version of the middle finger. From the hottest catch of the week, Paris had suddenly become tarnished goods nobody wanted. Finally, an interview was worked out with Larry King for the full hour. No money changed hands.

As for the interview, which got very good ratings for Larry, I found it extremely lackluster. The word around town is that friends of Larry’s say he was disappointed with the interview. As far as I was concerned, it was an eight-minute interview stretched out to an hour. From her dress to her makeup to her monotone answers, she was bland. She said the same thing over and over, how the jail experience is going to change her life. I also don’t believe Paris told the truth when she said she had never taken drugs. There are an awful lot of people out there ready to contradict her on that one. It would have been so much smarter to acknowledge it and then say, “That’s all in the past.” I also didn’t believe her when she said she had only had one drink when she was arrested for drunk driving. The biggest omission of the interview was the nonmention of Paris’s famous pornographic video, which was seen around the world for free on the Internet. It was the moment of her life that sealed her fame and entrapped her. Half the men in America have seen Paris with a penis in her mouth. Can you imagine what the inmates at the detention facility must have screamed at her about that movie? If she lives to 90 and becomes a Carmelite nun, that dirty movie is going to follow her right into the convent.

“Phil’s saliva was on Lana’s left breast, but there was no saliva on Phil’s penis.”

“But he had two different DNAs on his scrotum.”

“Who was the second?”

“Dunno.” —Conversation at Beverly Hills outdoor dinner party.

New York defense attorney Bruce Cutler, who was the number-one lawyer defending Phil Spector when the trial started, having succeeded Robert Shapiro and Leslie Abramson in that lofty capacity, is deeply out of favor on the defense team these days. He doesn’t even go up to the bench for the sidebars. He doesn’t get invited to the lunch meetings. Peter Hong, who is covering the trial for the Los Angeles Times, and I often have lunch with Bruce up in Peter’s office in the Criminal Courts Building. I don’t usually hang out with defense attorneys, being strongly pro-prosecution, but I really do enjoy Bruce’s company. He is an interesting guy. Naturally, he’s unhappy about being ignored, but he doesn’t bitch about the other members of the team. He’s a pro. For the past week or two, he has been out in Westlake Village, outside of Los Angeles, shooting a television series called Jury Duty, in which he plays a judge. He says he’ll be back for the closing arguments, which he calls the “summing-up,” as if he is going to be giving it, but a jury needs a face it knows for the summing-up.

In all the murder trials I’ve covered, the defendants never look at the photographs of the victims. The Menendez brothers never looked at their dead parents. Nor did O. J. Simpson look at the nearly beheaded Nicole. Spector, however, avidly looks at the many photographs of Lana’s dead body as they are flashed on the big screen in the courtroom.

A crime-scene photo showing Phil Spector’s Colt Cobra revolver next to Lana Clarkson’s feet the night she was found dead in Spector’s home. By Mario Anzuoni/EPA/Corbis.

The defense opened its case with a $400-an-hour forensics expert on gunshot wounds who held the jury in the palm of his hand as he decimated every point that the prosecution had made about the death of Lana Clarkson. The defense claims that Lana Clarkson committed suicide in Phil Spector’s castle, and this testimony set it up perfectly. The expert witness’s name was Dr. Vincent J. M. DiMaio. He was a bit full of himself, a showman, who felt very comfortable in the witness-box and made all his pronouncements directly to the jury. He decried the theory that a beautiful woman would not shoot herself in the face. He said that 76 percent of women’s suicides by gunshot are gunshots to the head. He said that most suicides don’t leave notes. The jury listened avidly. Personally, I thought he went too far when he called Lana drunk at the time of her death and a failure in life, implying that these were reasons she had been suicidal. I hate the blame-the-victim defense. Dr. DiMaio’s last words on the stand on his first day of testimony were “When you stick to the objective, scientific evidence, it’s a suicide.”

For the first time since the trial began, I doubted the certainty of the verdict I have always believed would come at the end of this trial. I went out to the corridor to send an e-mail to a friend who follows the trial avidly. “I began to have doubts today as to the outcome,” I wrote. “DiMaio devastated me with the power of his paid-for suicide version of Lana’s death. For several of the jurors, I’m sure, that version will register as truth.”

Shortly thereafter, the door of the courtroom opened and out came Rachelle Spector and Horace, the bodyguard. They were in ebullient spirits as they half ran down the corridor. When they saw me seated on a bench making a call, they stopped. Rachelle, who’s very pretty, smiled happily and gestured theatrically as she said, “Well, the truth is fi-nal-ly coming out,” referring to Dr. DiMaio’s statement as positive fact that Lana Clarkson had committed suicide.

Long trials are not riveting every day. Some of the scientific evidence gets boring hour after hour, but every now and then something out of the ordinary happens. Phil Spector had five children. He and his second wife, Ronnie Spector, adopted a baby boy named Donte. Two years later, they adopted twin six-year-olds, Louis and Gary. Just a few months after that, Ronnie left, and according to Louis Spector, the adoption papers were never signed by her. Phil had another set of twins, Nicole and Phillip Jr., with longtime girlfriend Janis Zavala. Phillip died when he was nine, which was a great tragedy in Phil’s life. Nicole has visited the courtroom at least once. She is more or less the same age as Rachelle.

The other day, Louis appeared in the corridor outside the courtroom. Spector is estranged from both his twin sons. Louis Spector was accompanied by a woman I assumed to be his wife. “One could easily make that mistake as we have been pretty much inseparable for the past 20 years,” he later said in an Internet post. A courtroom friend of mine named Betsy Ross, who posts on the trial on the Court TV Message Board, noticed Louis first. He looked like a hippie, with long hair tied in a ponytail and a scraggly beard. We introduced ourselves. His girlfriend’s name is Frieda. They live in Calabasas, where he works as a waiter, and had come to downtown Los Angeles, where the courthouse is located, by train. They had made one earlier appearance, on the first day of the trial, but had gone unnoticed by Spector. As we stood there, the door to the courtroom opened and Phil and Rachelle came out between two of his three guards. It looked as if Rachelle was meeting Louis for the first time. Phil shook hands with his son, but it was not a family sort of greeting, more as if he were meeting a fan or a stranger. I was standing right there as the under-a-minute encounter happened. Phil said, “I didn’t recognize you, Louis.” Louis replied, “It must be the long hair.” There seemed to be no joy in the encounter on either side. Then Phil and Rachelle and the guards retreated into the courtroom.

Louis was extremely moved by the brief encounter. He said, “That’s the first time my father has spoken to me in 20 years.” “No, Louis,” said Frieda. “He took you to a Lakers game 11 or 12 years ago.” “But he never spoke one word to me that night,” replied Louis. I thought he had tears in his eyes, but he denied that later at lunch in the courthouse commissary. He told us that one of the guards had said his father would speak to him more if he did not talk to the media. He said he was autistic but functioned in life. He paints and writes. He says that he was raised mostly by one of his father’s bodyguards, and that he and his twin brother, Gary, were sometimes locked in their rooms. He is in the process of writing a book about his own life, but publishers are interested only in his father. “I’ll be glad when Dr. DiMaio finishes and Alan Jackson starts the cross-examination,” he said.

Never underestimate the power of a great prosecutor. Deputy District Attorney Alan Jackson, who is the undisputed star of the trial, began his cross-examination of the very self-satisfied forensics expert Dr. DiMaio the next morning and delivered him into the same state of testy, angry response as he had the formidable Dr. Henry Lee, arguably the world’s greatest forensic scientist, when he cross-examined him out of the presence of the jury regarding a missing piece of crime-scene evidence, allegedly a false fingernail, that Dr. Lee has been accused of withholding from the prosecution. Jackson kicked the slats out from under Dr. DiMaio’s testimony. As far as I was concerned, Dr. DiMaio was toast.

One Saturday morning my friend Beth Karas, who is the on-air reporter on the Spector trial for Court TV, and I went to Venice, California, to check out Lana Clarkson’s cottage on the Grand Canal. In e-mails submitted as evidence at the trial, Lana several times mentioned her cottage, which she rented for $1,200 a month. It’s a tiny shack—450 square feet, very small quarters for the nearly six-foot-tall Lana—with a front porch, built in 1905. It was so flimsy, it looked as if a strong wind would blow it away, but it had a nice feeling to it. Lana’s landlady, Julie Jungwirth, and her husband, Jim, met us there to give us the tour of the three rooms and to talk about Lana, whom she obviously adored, both as a person and as a tenant.

“She was never more than a few weeks late with the rent,” said Mrs. Jungwirth. “Did you know she was doing her income tax before she went to work at the House of Blues that night? The papers were on her desk.” I didn’t know that. Nor did I know that she had just purchased “8 or 10 pairs of shoes” for her new job at the House of Blues. (Lynne Herold testified that the shoes Lana was wearing the night she died had barely worn soles.) She had also fixed up the place at her own expense. Both Julie and Jim smiled as they described how her bedroom was painted, with red walls and black doors. She also apparently had many photographs on her walls of Marilyn Monroe.

The cottage has now been repainted all white inside and is currently being used as an office by the contractors the Jungwirths hired to build a large condominium next door. Lana’s house has no value in itself, but the land on which it stands has become very valuable, and the cottage will be torn down when the condominium is complete. “She was the most up person I ever met,” said Julie Jungwirth. “Everyone here loved her. She was a jolly, happy person. I never saw her not smiling. She wrote poetry. She played music.” Mrs. Jungwirth paused before she quietly continued. “Lana was pretty strong, you know. She would have fought that night.”

Dominick Dunne is a best-selling author and special correspondent for Vanity Fair. His diary is a mainstay of the magazine.